Both Coetzee and Carey have won the Booker Prize twice.

The Booker rewards the best novel each year by a writer from Britain, Ireland or a Commonwealth country.

Salman Rushdie Midnight's Children ( Cape; paperback Vintage)- Booker Winner 1981, Best of Booker 2008, Booker 25th Anniversary Winner 1994.

Saleem Sinai was born at midnight, the midnight of India's independence, and found himself mysteriously 'handcuffed to history' by the coincidence. He is one of 1,001 children born at the midnight hour, each of them endowed with an extraordinary talent - and whose privilege and curse it is to be both master and victims of their times. Through Saleem's gifts - inner ear and wildly sensitive sense of smell - we are drawn into a fascinating family saga set against the vast, colourful background of the India of the 20th century.

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About the Author

Salman Rushdie is the author of eight novels, one collection of short stories, and four works of non-fiction, and the co-editor of The Vintage Book of Indian Writing. In 1993 Midnight's Children was judged to be the 'Booker of Bookers', the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. The Moor's Last Sigh won the Whitbread Prize in 1995, and the European Union's Aristelon Prize for Literature in 1996. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres.

The Other Finalist -

Pat Barker The Ghost Road (The Regeneration Trilogy)( Viking; paperback Penguin) _ Booker Winner 1995

The Ghost Road is the shattering conclusion of Pat barker's brilliant World War I trilogy. Set in the final months of the war, The Ghost Road focuses on Dr. William Rovers, the compassionate psychiatrist of Regeneration and Lt. Billy Prior, last seen as a domestic intelligence agent in The Eye in the Door. "A triumph of imagination".--Publisher's Weekly.

About the author
Novelist Pat Barker was born in Thornaby-on-Tees in Yorkshire, England, on 8 May 1943. She was educated at the London School of Economics, where she read International History, and at Durham University. She taught History and Politics until 1982. She began to write in her mid-twenties and was encouraged to pursue her career as a writer by the novelist Angela Carter. Her early novels dealt with the harsh lives of working-class women living in the north of England. Her first book, Union Street (1982) won the Fawcett Society Book Prize, while her second, Blow Your House Down (1984), was adapted for the stage by Sarah Daniels in 1994. The Century's Daughter (re-published as Liza's England in 1996) was published in 1986, followed by The Man Who Wasn't There in 1989.

In 1983 she was named as one of the 20 'Best Young British Novelists' in a promotion run by the Book Marketing Council and Granta magazine. Her trilogy of novels about the First World War, which began with Regeneration in 1991, was partly inspired by her grandfather's experiences fighting in the trenches in France. Regeneration was made into a film in 1997 starring Jonathan Pryce and James Wilby. The Eye in the Door (1993), the second novel in the trilogy, won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and The Ghost Road (1995), the final novel in the series, won the Booker Prize for Fiction. Another World (1998), although set in contemporary Newcastle, is overshadowed by the memories of an old man who fought in the First World War.

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Peter Carey Oscar and Lucinda ( Faber & Faber; paperback Faber) - Booker Winner 1988

ISBN: 0571153046 EAN: 9780571153046

Set onboard an ocean liner travelling to Australia in 1864, this novel is both a love story and an historical tour-de-force that relates the developing romance between Oscar Hopkins, an Oxford seminarian, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a Sydney heiress with a fascination for glass. Australian writer Peter Carey is the author of a selection of short stories, "The Fat Man in History" and two novels, "Bliss" and "Illywhacker"

About the author Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh in Victoria, Australia, in 1943. He studied Science at Monash University, and wrote advertising copy to support himself during the early part of his literary career. Australian identity and historical context play a part in several of his literary works.

He began by writing surreal short stories, and published two collections, War Crimes (1979), and The Fat Man in History (1980). These stories, along with three previously uncollected works, are all included in his Collected Stories (1995).

He then wrote 3 novels: Bliss (1981), about an advertising executive who has an out-of-body experience; Illywhacker (1985), a huge vision of Australian history told through the memoirs of a 100-year old confidence man or "illywhacker"; and Oscar and Lucinda (1988), a complex symbolic tale of the arrival of Christianity in Australia. Although not a science fiction writer as such, there are some elements of this in his writing, particularly in Illywhacker, which led to this novel receiving the Ditmar Award for Best Australian Science Fiction Novel and being shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, both in 1986. Illywhacker was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1985, and three years later, Oscar and Lucinda won the same prize.

While writing his next novel, The Tax Inspector (1991), Peter Carey moved to New York, and has since written four further novels: The Unusual Life of Tristran Smith (1994); Jack Maggs (1997), billed as a re-imagining of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations; True History of the Kelly Gang (2001), told in fictional letters from the Australian outlaw and folk hero Ned Kelly to his estranged daughter; and My Life as a Fake (2003), a story centred around a literary hoax which gripped Australia in the 1940s. Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang both won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) and with True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey won the Booker Prize for Fiction for the second time, in 2001.

Peter Carey wrote the script for the Wim Wenders film, Until the End of the World (1992), and co-wrote with Ray Lawrence, the screenplay for the film adaptation of Bliss (1985). Oscar and Lucinda was also adapted for film in 1997, with a screenplay written by Laura Jones.

He has also written a children's book, The Big Bazoohley (1995) and a non-fiction book, 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account (2001). Wrong about Japan (2005), is a memoir/travelogue of the author's journey through Japan with his son Charley and their attempts to understand the Japanese culture and heritage.

Peter Carey still lives in New York, where he teaches Creative Writing at New York University. He has been awarded three honorary degrees and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Australian Academy of Humanities and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His latest novels are Theft: A Love Story (2006); and His Illegal Self (2008).

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JM Coetzee Disgrace (1999, Secker & Warburg; paperback Vintage) - Booker Winner 1999

Set in post-apartheid Cape Town, Professor David Laurie attempts to relate to his daughter, Lucy, and to a society with new racial complexities. But that is disrupted by an afternoon of violence that changes him and his daughter in ways he could never have foreseen. Coetzee is the only writer awarded the Booker Prize twice, and this work is a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Awards.

Publisher Marketing:

-- Disgrace -- one of only four works of fiction -- was chosen by the editors of the New York Times Book Review as one of the eleven Best Books of the Year
-- A New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, New York Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Village Voice Literary Supplement, Wordstock, Ingrain, and Independent bestseller
-- A Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and QuaLity Paperback Book Club
-- A finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Awards

Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist ( Cape; paperback Bloomsbury)- Booker Winner 1974

Synopsis:
Mehring, a wealthy, dominating South African industrialist moves to preserve his way of life, his power, and his possessions in the face of massive injustice and suffering, changing times, and death.

Review:
"Nadine Gordimer has written a masterpiece in 'The Conservationist,' a brilliant study of a wealthy, white industrialist in South Africa, a dealer in base metals, whose self-definition depends upon random and unsuitable sexual encounters, unlimited meditations upon death, and alienation from his family while his so-called primitive neighbors play out their lives among their kin in labor, custom, and ceremony." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)

JG Farrell The Siege of Krishnapur ( Weidenfeld & Nicolson, paperback Phoenix) - Booker Winner 1973

India, 1857--the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrell's "The Siege of Krishnapur," widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last fifty years.

Farrell's story is set in an isolated Victorian outpost on the subcontinent. Rumours of strife filter in from afar, and yet the members of the colonial community remain confident of their military and, above all, moral superiority. But when they find themselves under actual siege, the true character of their dominion--at once brutal, blundering, and wistful--is soon revealed. "The Siege of Krishnapur" is a companion to "Troubles," about the Easter 1916 rebellion in Ireland, and "The Singapore Grip," which takes place just before World War II, as the sun begins to set upon the British Empire. Together these three novels offer an unequaled picture of the follies of empire.

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